Q4 game sales show PS2 on top, Xbox 360 gaining

The annual Game Developers Conference gets under way Monday in San Francisco, so you can expect Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft to spend lots of time over the next few days touting the relative merits of making games for their respective consoles. But which machine is actually bringing in the highest volume of game sales for third-party developers and publishers?

It’s not any of the next-generation consoles, at least not based on game sales for the holiday season. It’s the PlayStation 2, reflecting the huge number of people still playing games on the 7-year-old Sony console. But Microsoft’s Xbox 360 is a clear second overall, and first among the new wave of consoles.

Here’s how we know: Publicly traded video game publishers have all reported their fourth-quarter financial results in recent weeks, so I was able to update the statistics that I began compiling last year, showing video-game sales per console. Keeping in mind the statistical limitations mentioned in that original post, the chart below breaks down, by console, the video-game revenue reported by five big publishers for the fourth quarter in each of the past three years.

It’s important to note that this is still a market in flux. The Xbox 360 benefited from greater supply over the holidays, thanks to Microsoft’s yearlong head start. The PlayStation 3, in particular, suffered from shortages. And the Nintendo Wii has surged in post-holiday console sales, so its standing is likely to change when the publishers report their financial results for the current quarter.

That said, to get a better sense for where Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo stand overall, here’s what the numbers above look like when you combine each company’s old and new consoles. I’ll be interested in hearing what people think, especially about the market-share trends in the pie charts across the bottom.